I Draw The Line At Butt Cheeks Showing & I’m Not Sorry

I’m a firm believer in the body positive movement. I am fully on board with the idea that we should be thoughtful about how we talk about our bodies and other people’s bodies, and how we should often, instead, just keep our mouths shut. That said: wow, the shorts on kids these days are short. Like, crescent-moon-of-butt-cheek-visible short. I mean, I didn’t even wear lingerie that short on my honeymoon.

Any time you leave your house or browse TikTok, you’ll see Gen Z and even Gen Alpha (kids 13 and under; yes, they have a label now too) are enthusiastically embracing short shorts and crop tops. And I’ll be honest: it rubs me the wrong way. (Get used to these puns.)

It’s especially tricky for parents of teens and tweens these days, because social norms have kind of gone out the window. We’re the ones who decide whether to police our kids’ clothes and if so, how much and using what language. This unwanted job is forcing me to ask myself: Am I a total hypocrite?

Self-expression through clothing has long been a mainstay of adolescence. It’s developmentally normal for kids to differentiate themselves from adults and part of that process is choosing to look different. (And maybe even enjoy pissing us off as an added bonus.) Many of us went through it ourselves as teens – flannel shirts tied around the waist and jeans with holes in the knees were my particular look – so why do this generation's (teens, tweens and younger!) belly-baring and ass peek-a-boo style choices feel so jarring to me? If I was truly a body positive proponent, I shouldn’t care what people wear, right?

As someone who has spent her career working to empower girls, I find this tightrope very tricky. I would never want to slut-shame kids for simply expressing themselves, but I’m also aware that their style choices are born of the media’s pressure encouraging them to dress a certain way. They don’t just decide one day that nipple exposing tops are cool – there are powerful cultural forces at work. It’s not on a whim that they've decided on butt-flossing swimsuit bottoms.

And it’s not just kids who feel pressure. Adults also feel under the microscope, and that vulnerability leads us to judge our own kids and all the other kids we know. Adolescent wardrobe choices are a perfect opportunity to look at another parent and think: At least someone is doing worse at this than I am. But I’ve been around the childrearing block long enough to know this: the minute you pass judgment on someone else is the minute it will come back to bite you in the ass. Parenting karma is a b*tch.

I decided to look inward and plumb the depths of my own reactions. What am I worried about? What was making me uncomfortable? Can I fairly make some rules?

The first thing I copped to is this: the idea of kids wearing revealing clothing feels scary. As parents, our worry boils down to this fallacy: wearing that outfit will make you the recipient of unwanted looks, comments or touch. We tell ourselves that covering up will keep kids safer, but of course we know all too well this isn’t true. Except when it comes to SPF coverage, when I see kids in tube tops all I can think of is the terrible sunburn they’re going to get!

If I’m being honest, it’s not just about safety, but also about sexuality (purposefully expressed or not.) When younger kids imitate the fashion trends of teenagers, they can appear to the world as more sexual beings, even if that’s not at all their purpose for dressing that way. And when older kids dress in more revealing outfits, it’s a reminder that they are becoming sexual beings, regardless of our comfort level with their sartorial choices or their burgeoning identities. Embarrassingly, I find myself sounding a lot like my grandma: Honey, leave a little something to the imagination.

We want the kids in our lives to stride confidently into the world, expressing themselves authentically and loving their bodies. I am desperate for my daughter to avoid the hang ups about her body that I have lived with for decades, but my own fears keep popping up, making it hard to embrace an empowering approach to kids' style. Every family will make different choices on this issue. There is no one-size-fits-all approach (yes, pun intended), but there are some parameters I like to hold onto when walking this fine line with my own family.

I have a right to set limits. Kids feel safe when they have boundaries to bump up against. Just like we can decide how often dessert is served or how much screen time a kid has, we can also set limits on kids’ clothing: what the clothing budget is, what clothing is acceptable for what settings, what they are allowed to buy with their own money, but not ours. One of mine? No ass cheeks peeking out of the bottom of shorts. There’s also a hygiene issue here: vulvas need to breathe, and tight, microscopic shorts don’t leave a lot of room for airflow.

Balancing expectations and kid’s self-expression is possible. I want my kids to be their authentic selves and I know clothing is one way to do that. But they also attend a school that has a dress code and live in a community that is not an anything-goes kind of vibe. So I work really hard (to varying levels of success) to give them freedom of expression while still holding them to broader expectations. There’s no getting around the fact that the ability to read the room and act accordingly is an important skill for them as they become adults. Case in point: The crop top my daughter bought with her own money is fine for concerts, but it’s a no-go for school. And if I’m being honest, she bought the crop top knowing I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I had said to her: I’m not spending my money on that top.

Constantly gauge where my own reactions are coming from. This one is the hardest for me because it’s not just about fashion choices. It means taking a long look at my own biases about weight, sexuality, and safety and being brutally honest about why I don’t want my kids to wear certain things. I have found a couple of friends with whom I can bare the darkest parts of my soul on these issues, rather than saying thoughtless and hurtful things to my kids.

Staying safe is about so much more than clothing. The ultimate goal as parents is to keep our kids healthy and safe. We grew up in a troubling culture that tells us that dressing a certain way puts you at risk and it’s your own fault. But teaching kids how to stay safe and how to respect other people is about so much more than clothing. It’s about understanding consent in all its forms, about respecting people's physical boundaries, about bodily autonomy. We can’t necessarily control how people look at us or how they talk to us, but we can learn to feel confident in our own bodies to self-advocate.

At the end of it all, maybe I am still a hypocrite. The product of my own socialization, biases, and baggage. But that’s true of everything we strive toward as parents — developing an awareness of when our own crap gets in the way, balanced with the moments we’re actually doing pretty well.

Vanessa Kroll Bennett is the co-author of the forthcoming This Is So Awkward, co-host of The Puberty Podcast, President of Content at Order of Magnitude, the founder of Dynamo Girl, a company using sports and puberty education to empower kids, and the author of the Uncertain Parenting Newsletter, musings on raising adolescents. You can follow her on Instagram @vanessakrollbennett.